How do you recreate an identical sketch on another face/plane? Convert edges is fine if you want to project a sketch to a parallel face or plane, but what if the face in question is not parallel? You could copy a sketch and then mess around with linking all the dimensions, but what if you want the sketch in a different orientation? Enter the Derived Sketch command.
The Derived Sketch is a cool tool; it creates a copy of a sketch that is tied back to the original. After deriving a …

The 2009 SolidWorks User Group Network (SWUGN) Technical Summits are about to get underway!  The first one finds SolidWorks returning to sunny Orlando, FL, the site of the recent SolidWorks World 2009 conference, on April 28.
If you didn’t get to attend SolidWorks World this year, the Technical Summits are the next best thing!  I liken it to a massive user group meeting.
The structure is similar to one day at SolidWorks World, but on a smaller scale; and they are bringing it to you!  There will be representatives of local user groups, VAR’s, and SolidWorks in …

Publicly unveiled in late March, OnLive bills itself as “the world’s highest performance Games on Demand service.”  They purportedly have the technology to stream games, including the latest high-end game titles (such as Crysis Warhead and BioShock) to broadband users.  (For a full list of supported games, click here.)
The service will run through the OnLive Microconsole and play on a user’s TV, or can be run directly on a Mac or PC.  The founder, Steve Perlman (of WebTV and Apple’s QuickTime), says, “The first patents expire in 2022, so …

Back in early December, I posted an article on Display States and Steve Calvert commented about controlling the visibility of new components:

Brian, I use display states and love them except for the fact that when I add a component I have to go back and remove (hide) it from the already created display states. Do you know a way to add a component and only have it show in certain display states?
Steve Calvert
Originally posted as a comment by Steve_Calvert on CADFanatic using Disqus.

And I responded:

Steve,
I’m unsure of previous versions, but …

At this year’s SolidWorks World 2009 conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. William Doll, Director of SolidWorks Labs.
After talking with Bill there and later through email concerning another article, I wished to learn a little more about SolidWorks Labs and share it with you. Bill graciously agreed to an email interview, and I learned a lot. I hope you find it informative!
CADFanatic: Hi Bill, it was great meeting you in Orlando at SolidWorks World 2009. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview.
Bill Doll: Hi Brian, it was a pleasure …

Do you know about the “secret” Forced Rebuild command?  I say secret, because there is no menu item for it; it is only accessed by hitting CTRL-Q.  It does everything Rebuild does, and much more!
A Forced Rebuild rebuilds the entire feature tree from the beginning, unlike the regular Rebuild command, which only rebuilds what has changed since the last Rebuild.
Well, John Setzer of Graphics/Systems has a post on their blog, SOLIDNotes, regarding the differences between these two Rebuild commands.  He goes into a lot of detail on how the Rebuild commands walk through …

Have you moved to SolidWorks 2009 yet?  If you haven’t, and need a good reason to do so, then continue reading!

SolidWorks touts the maximum time savings of moving from SolidWorks 2008 to SolidWorks 2009 as 65%.  Is it true?
Well, I have not done any quantitative testing, but I can say that it definitely feels much faster to me; especially in larger assemblies and more complicated parts.  However, a user from our user group did a not-so-scientific test with a representative set of production files, and the results were amazing!
THE TEST
The …

The proceedings from the SolidWorks World 2009 International User Conference and Exposition in Orlando, Florida, are now live! And things are a little different this year… Based on feedback from previous World’s, SolidWorks has opened up access to a broader audience and captured more media data to share.
CUSTOMER PORTAL USERS REJOICE!
In year’s past, attendees used a unique log-in to access the presentations and files from the conference. This year, SolidWorks is making the proceedings site available to all users with a Customer Portal account. If you do not already have a …

Daniel Ha, co-founder and CEO of Disqus, and Pete Cashmore, founder of social media guide Mashable, announced today a partnership between Disqus, Mashable, and comment aggregation service uberVU to enable Social Media Comments on the popular Disqus commenting system. Disqus will use uberVU’s technology to scrape the Internet and pull in comments relating to posts.
According to Mashable, the services that will be accessed include Blogger, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Moveable Type, Picasa, Twitter, TypePad, Vimeo, WordPress, and YouTube, with more added over time.  If a post is discussed on any …

 
What happens when you pit a 400-pound sumo wrestler against a little pink scooter?  Well, SolidWorks has a pretty funny interactive demo that allows you to see!  This is a recreation of the Simulation skit with the infamous pink scooter and the Sumo wrestler from the Tuesday General Session at SolidWorks World 2009.  There is actually more to see on this page than what they did on stage.
See how the scooter handles the real-world stress, drop, motion, and airflow tests (after all, it IS entirely within the realm of possiblity that a …

Back in early December, I reported that SolidWorks Labs had unveiled Treehouse, an app that lets you set up a file hierarchy for new assemblies using your templates.  But based on the comments to my article and the responses I saw on Twitter and the app page itself, users were hoping for more functionality, such as opening and modifying existing assembly structures or inserting existing parts or assemblies.
While at SolidWorks World 2009 in Orlando earlier this month, I was able to meet William Doll, Director of SolidWorks Labs.  I …

Fielder Hiss, Director of Product Management at SolidWorks, took the stage once again for Wednesday’s General Session.  SolidWorks had another surprise in store for everyone, as Joe Grand and Dr. Mike North from the Discovery Channel show, “Prototype This” took the stage.  At first, it seemed as if they were a no-show, then they made their way through the audience from the back of the room on an apparatus they had designed for firefighters to use to transport gear and personnel.
They gave an interesting talk about some of the …